Because He Cares
by digby
Newt Gingrich, who led the GOP takeover of the House in 1994, is now coaching Republicans on how to recapture the Senate.
The former House Speaker and icon of the right is quietly expanding his influence in the upper chamber, where he is selling ideas on refurbishing the GOP’s image. Facing the harshest climate for their party in over a decade, Senate Republicans are hungry for his counsel.
“He’s trying to identify a path to victory in the fall,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), adding, “It would be wise for us to listen.”
For Gingrich, helping Republicans mend their reputation is a chance to rehabilitate his own. A polarizing figure in the 1990s, he attracted a groundswell of conservative support when he flirted with a presidential run last year, leading his allies to believe he could be a future contender for the White House.
Widely regarded as a visionary for his party, Gingrich has often fashioned himself as a friendly critic of Republicans since he left Congress in 1999. Though he still has the ear of many in the House, some bristled at an open letter he sent last month exhorting the GOP leadership to take drastic action to avoid huge losses in November.
Lately, Gingrich has drawn more willing pupils in the upper chamber, where Republicans mostly have a foggier memory of his stumbles as Speaker and view him primarily as a brilliant tactician with an arsenal of ideas. Senate Republicans, who arguably have a tougher battle this fall than do their counterparts in the House, are also eager for help.
Right. They were so busy deciding whether to follow through on the Gingrich led impeachment, they didn’t notice that Newt was a complete failure. But hey, these guys are so bereft of ideas about what to do next that they’ll listen to anyone.
Besides, Newt isn’t really a partisan guy. He’s a non-partisan reformer:
A spokesman for Gingrich, Joe DeSantis, quibbled with the notion that Gingrich is chiefly concerned with helping Republicans regain power. He said his boss’s top priority is working with Democrats and Republicans to achieve a set of reforms. “Obviously, he is a partisan person. But he believes that in order to get the scale of change we need, that it has to occur in both parties,” he said.
(Gosh, I feel a song coming on. The tune sounds sort of like “Kumbaaya” but the lyrics are “Hit Me Baby, One More Time.” Weird.)
He does have gift for sensing the zeitgeist, though, at least in terms of political rhetoric. Where he once believed that the way to coerce the public into supporting the Big Money Boyz’s agenda was with muscular aggressive anti-liberal rhetoric, he now sees that it’s gone stale and needs a new marketing campaign:
[H]e has also increased his collaboration with Senate Republicans, prodding them to ditch tired refrains on taxes and other perennial GOP issues and to embrace Democrats’ call for change.
“His general advice is: Be in touch, don’t be just repeating things you heard from the ’70s and the ’80s,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), a longtime Gingrich ally who heads the Senate GOP conference.
Last month, Gingrich spoke to the Senate Republican chiefs of staff about legislation that could attract broad public support. In February, Alexander invited him to address the Republican Conference at its weekly lunch, a privilege usually reserved for the president, vice president or a Cabinet member.
He has met with several individual Senate offices as well as with smaller groups of aides, often with one or two members present, according to people familiar with the meetings. “He is more visible, certainly,” Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) said.
Several people close to Gingrich doubt that his recent efforts on the Hill are driven by any lingering presidential ambitions he might have.
He does it “because he cares,” Rep. Phil English (R-Pa.) said.
Gingrich would be compelled to share his knowledge regardless of any personal motive, American Conservative Union President David Keene argued.
“When he was Speaker, part of the problem was that he wanted to be America’s teacher. He does this because that’s what he is, that’s who he is,” Keene, a columnist for The Hill, said.
What he “teaches” America is to vote against its own economic interests. And he is especially good at appropriating liberal themes and putting them to use for the corporations and aristocrats he really serves.
At the February lunch, Gingrich told Republicans that they should agree with Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), the Democratic nominee for president, when he calls for changing Washington — but then press him on how he would do it, according to a GOP leadership aide who was present.
Gingrich argued the strategy would expose Obama’s weak spot: that he has presented no clear plan for achieving reform because he fears irking key Democratic constituencies. “When he said that, you could see people around the room thinking, ‘He has a good point,’ ” the aide said.
McCain is already on board the Change Talk Express:
I think it’s an important part of this campaign to point out that everybody wants change, but there is a right change and a wrong change. I believe that what Senator Obama is advocating is a return to the failed policies of the ’60s and ’70s—bigger government, higher taxes—and certainly not the same view on national-security challenges. So, I thought it was important to point out that there is a right change and a wrong change
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There’s nothing revolutionary about what Gingrich is suggesting. Everyone in politics is running as far and as fast from the disaster of the past 8 years as their Gucci loafers will carry them. The only people who don’t want “change” from Bush’s policies are actually working in the administration, (and even those are probably far and few between.) But Newt does have a talent for making people think they’ve heard something for the very first time when he says it. And he is a malevolent, destructive force in politics no matter what he does and should never, ever be trusted. If Newt’s on the other side of any bipartisan deal, watch your back.
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